by Jan Clausen
The situation also illustrates, however, how one’s social environment can promote the subordination of inchoate desires to the requirements of congealed identities. The very fact that my world was so straight at this point made it unlikely that I would vigorously pursue my attraction to Alexa, less out of fear of unmasking a lesbian true self than because my feelings for her lacked the legitimizing context that tradition accorded to even my flimsiest heterosexual crushes. Had a similar situation arisen in a later decade when lesbian couples were much in evidence on liberal campuses, I might have been more direct with her. If not, my assessment of my own internal state might have more quickly alerted me to other lesbian attractions, for the evidence is clear that as I “discovered” women, I made no hard and fast distinction between admiration and desire.
The “incredible deliciousness” of my dalliance with Ned lost its savor soon enough. The sex was a big disappointment, for one thing, and though I tried to rationalize his sporadic interest, I could guess that he wasn’t exactly celibate when I was up in Portland. His male supremacist rhetoric was too much altogether. Years later, Alexa liked to reminisce about how he’d once admonished her, “If you don’t learn to follow, you’ll never have a man!”
Ned and I lapsed almost gently from each other’s lives. “It’s my fault that I let him talk me into eternal love so easily,” I noted in my journal early in February 1970. “I cannot understand how it is that I can be so opposite. I am inwardly independent and outwardly so compliant. I want a man to master me, and yet inside I don’t much agree with most of their opinions.” I didn’t think to invoke William Blake, whose “Proverbs of Hell” I so admired around this time: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Embracing male chauvinism at such a pitch of caricature had forever soured me on self-proclaimed manly men.
Sternly focused on the need for self-reliance, I read The Narrow Road to the Deep North by the Japanese haiku master Bashō and took long rainy walks in the early Portland spring. I was steeling myself to kick college cold turkey.
It seemed crucial to leave Reed without earning a degree. I’d tried to drop out before, but had been dissuaded by my parents, and by what I deemed my own cowardice in being overly concerned with how I would make a living, not to mention how I’d structure my life outside the womb of campus and the academic calendar. Now I was getting braver, less resigned to my desperation. I was writing more, revising, even showing poems to others—an exposure that required much the same charade of toughness as having sex with men I didn’t trust. I struggled to reconcile art and academics. For so long my existence had focused on school, had run along a track laid down by others’ expectations, that I began to think if I didn’t get out fast, I’d never have a life to call my own.
Approaching my “junior quals,” examinations required to proceed with my major, I worried that no thinker I’d studied had offered solid answers to the fundamental questions. My unease was stained with gender in ways invisible to me. I’d been exposed to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, so I knew there was some sense in even the most exalted quarters that the most basic forms of knowledge might be strangely mutable. Yet I still felt as though I must be lacking something, some male confidence, some affinity for proof. I knew my epistemological jitters wouldn’t end with a B.A., and I had a horror of the limbo of graduate school, the only obvious sequel to a Reed philosophy degree.
If the problems of having a female intelligence were all the more daunting for being inarticulable (in part because there literally was no language for them—everyone knew that mind was a universal term, like man), then the same was true for the problems of having a female body. I tried to believe the premise I’d been raised on, and that parts of my Reed experience reinforced: for the modern generation to which I belonged, new technologies and enlightened attitudes had rendered physical difference obsolete. But the longer I stayed in college, the more entangled I became in bewildering contradictions, no-win situations that I was at a loss to analyze because I had as yet no access to the feminist concepts that were being hammered out in consciousness-raising groups and political collectives far from self-involved Reed.
For one thing, I was having eating problems. They had begun in high school, but grew worse when I left home. I would starve myself, then gorge, then be frantic about my weight (which I fortunately never thought of controlling by vomiting). This was before eating disorders came into vogue, and I had no sense that my alimentary roller coaster was anything other than a unique perversity. My flesh, my appetite, required unceasing management, an unspeakably trivial yet obsessive preoccupation that felt woefully unadult, unserious, degrading. Which is perhaps to say that it felt womanish—as did, indeed, the fact of excess poundage. Men floated above their bodies; women seemed to wallow in them. I felt, I have always felt, I continue to feel, that fat (my own—I’m more tolerant of others’) is sexually unattractive; but worse than that, it’s the external mark of a kind of hideous slackness, a spongy feminine physicality. I’m not anorexic, but I see very clearly how a self-destructive thinness can feel like vengeful power.
When I starved myself, I couldn’t concentrate on studies. Binging was worse. When I ate more than enough and still couldn’t stop, I felt grotesque, like a great-aunt on my mother’s side whom the extended family viewed with circumspect horror as an example of what could happen when a woman “let herself go.” My mother’s maternal grandmother, a Minnesota farmer’s wife who had borne eleven children, had also been huge (and, it was hinted, slatternly). They were women who somehow had become their bodies in a radical, helpless way that haunted the rest of us. My compulsion would not have caused me so much anguish had I been concerned solely for my physical appearance. I felt somehow existentially impaired, in danger of being trapped not merely by excess flesh, but within a loathsome self.
Meanwhile, as I strove to assert my dignity through a principled defiance of sexual convention, I kept coming up against the double standard. The injustice of it never ceased to gall me, and I’d been beside myself with naive indignation on hearing that a guy I’d slept with freshman year had reported I was “easy.” “Easy!” I fumed. “No easier than he was!”
As a junior, post-Ned, I reflected in my journal, apropos of a brief encounter with a stoned boy I’d met at a campus dance, whose demand for “a passionate kiss” I’d prudently ignored: “this is actually what I want, or think I want: lots of more or less undifferentiated men. But with no complications.” If my body were free to circulate in a gender-neutral erotic marketplace along with other free bodies—so went the logic supporting the appeal of the sexual revolution to young women like myself—I might thereby be liberated. If I could graduate from being a man’s consumer object to exercising my own consumer options, I’d achieve equality.
Or should I make a virtue of necessity and celebrate my own consumption? As I floundered in the nets of gender paradox, I had once actually made an unsuccessful attempt to trade sex for money. At the end of my sophomore year, in need of a summer job, I decided to try to be a topless dancer. This line of work was almost a tradition at Reed. It was viewed as a pretty good gig for a girl because it paid twice as much as entry-level clerical work. But more than that, it was hip, a way of working the system, like getting food stamps or selling a lid here and there or dodging the opportunity to die horribly in defense of the murderous worldview of Lyndon Baines Johnson. If men were stupid enough to pay to look at your tits (to purchase your cooperation in their fantasy that you were no more than a pair of tits), why not take advantage of it?
I tried out at lunchtime in a bar called the Bellroom, a nondescript, more than half empty joint in a neighborhood of decaying housing stock and the drabbest of industry. The coarse little middle-aged man who hired and bossed the dancers (he called himself an agent) received me in his office behind the Bellroom’s narrow stage. He handed me my costume, a pair of frilly panties that had too clearly been pre-owned (were there pasties? I can’t remember), look
ed me over wearily, and sent me out to do my thing.
The music came from a jukebox, and was repetitive; I remember dancing over and over to “The Age of Aquarius.” I had to wear very high heels, which hurt a lot. The men at the tables looked like losers. I wasn’t afraid of them, just embarrassed about not being very good. I thought it shouldn’t matter, though: they were getting what they’d paid for, weren’t they? Smallish breasts, slightly marred by a ribboning of stretch marks, but young bare bouncing breasts all the same.
The first session left me feeling discouraged. I imagined working nights, getting off in the small hours, waiting forever for an empty bus. I couldn’t stop feeling nervous in the presence of the agent. I went back once more, then admitted I couldn’t hack it. Fortunately my mother had insisted that I take the Civil Service exam, and I eventually got offered a summer file clerk job at the Veterans Administration. It was deadly dull, but I accepted gratefully.
You never know what is enough, wrote William Blake, unless you know what is more than enough. Anyone as ill at ease as I with the basic conventions of boy-girl interaction, whose idea of seduction was to write a well-crafted letter, who felt weirdly exposed by the contrivances of fashion, the masquerade of sex appeal, was unlikely to shine as an exotic dancer. Yet I had wanted to think I could pull it off. In part, my wish was in keeping with the spirit of an age in which all sexual scruples were supposed to be passé. But that very spirit linked up with a broader inclination to question both the solidity of “eternal human nature” and the coherence of individual character. If these were mirages, what wasn’t possible?
Ironically, predictably, the mirages wouldn’t budge. I had discovered limits beyond which it felt too risky and laborious to venture. My mind and my body (if in fact they were really twain) declined to cooperate in the seductive pantomime, elementary though it was, required at the Bellroom.
In the spring of 1970, my deepest interests apart from poetry revolved around questions about the consistency and continuity of the self. “I cannot understand how it is that I can be so opposite,” I had written after breaking up with Ned. I meant inconsistent or contradictory, but the mistake itself is telling, as though “oppositeness” were a personal attribute and not a function of two people in relation. Now I copied out a passage from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn: “She changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she was really like because with each one she was an entirely different person . . .” I was mulling over a new version of the problem I had noted four years earlier in connection with George Fava’s flattering attentions: how could I tell the difference between my own desire and my satisfaction in arousing another’s interest?
I evidently suspected that inconsistency might be a specifically female problem. But a broad unease about the unity or fragmentation of any self as it exists in time had also plagued me in those earlier journals, where I had worried that if I deferred the reading of books forbidden by my parents, the person who eventually got to read them would no longer be the “I” that right this minute burned to know what they contained. Now I seized on a passage from Gertrude Stein’s What Are Masterpieces: “The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. . . . I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation.”
Of course, “identity,” in the who-am-I? sense, is a famous concern of adolescents, and I underwent my share of that sort of searching, but I also worried about even more troubling issues: was there ever really an “I” that could be said to be one thing or another? Was there something wrong with “me” if “I” could not achieve the consistency that my social world—that little dog—demanded? And if consistency were in fact illusory, then how was “I” to endure my solitude? If even the self is a flickering fiction, what becomes of self-reliance?
It’s intriguing to speculate why I focused at just this time on questions that almost eerily foreshadowed my later crisis of sexual identity. If my intermittent attractions to women were a factor, they were not yet a major one. I had as yet no developed thought of a permanent choice between the genders.
Precisely because I still could not imagine a world centered on anything other than what men wrote and did, the seeming anomaly of my “lesbian” interests preoccupied me less than what I saw as the bizarre eclecticism of my attractions to males. I had by now sampled enough partners to be uneasily acquainted with the temptation to shape-shifting described by Henry Miller. What had egotists like Ansel or Ned seen in me, anyway? Was it anything that could be said to be really there? What, for that matter, had I seen in them? In a sense, the alarm I felt when I ran down my list of lovers was a tangible expression of my panic at the pressure to invent my womanhood from scratch. “I” wasn’t a given. “I” felt too slippery. The vertigo implicit in the sentence “you can be anything” was hitting full force.
Yet I couldn’t be just anything—a topless dancer, for instance, or someone who enjoyed sex with strangers. The paradox I faced at eighteen or twenty was similar to that confronted by anyone today who wishes to debunk the myth of universal erotic predestination without encouraging homophobes’ tenacious wish to believe that gay people, given a little willpower, could cultivate straight desires.
The problem reduces to this: how to honor the flux while giving full weight to repetition and patterning. Lives move unpredictably, but not haphazardly. The self as it’s lived this side of Buddhist enlightenment is no mere superstition. But neither is it one and indivisible. Why is it so hard to hold on to this doubleness, especially when eros enters the picture? (For if, as I keep arguing, sexuality is not some precinct sealed off from the rest of life, then my horror of commonplace seductive routines, my emotional tilt toward monogamy, appear to be as much in need of explanation as someone else’s fixed attraction to one or the other gender.)
Curiously, my eventual success in dropping out of Reed (which entailed deliberately failing several classes) can be viewed either as an example of inconsistency because it decisively besmirched my shining academic record, or alternatively as a teeth-gritting effort to carry through a predetermined course of action. Either way, it was yet another dramatic rupture, in line with my rejection of my parents’ values and my abrupt break with Sasha. By the time I got around to changing sexual identities, I’d have plenty of practice in leaving old worlds for new ones.
My departure from Reed marked the end of my interest in “undifferentiated men.” I also quit using most illegal substances; they were harder to come by off campus, and faded in appeal once I wasn’t around people who were forever getting high. I vowed never to weigh myself and stuck to it for years. I did gain weight, but gradually resolved the worst of my eating problems.
Social issues were rapidly coming into focus. Not that I’d been completely oblivious before. I’d celebrated when LBJ declined to run for reelection, had tracked the Tet Offensive with Walter Cronkite in Lower Commons. When the BSU took over Eliot Hall, I’d cheered the demand for Black Studies from the sidelines. But working for change had seemed outside my sphere, and Reed had only encouraged my impression that thought and action wouldn’t mix very well. Now I began to feel responsible for distant happenings.
It was all coming down: the Cambodian incursion, students murdered at Kent State and Jackson State. Even Reedies hit the streets, deserting placid Eastmoreland to march downtown with our counterparts from Portland State College. One side’s right, one side’s wrong, victory to the Viet Cong: I blanched at the simple-minded rhetoric, but plumped down on the asphalt and got myself arrested with a couple of freshman girls in combat jackets who were touchingly eager to make a radical statement.
Somewhere during those weeks of turmoil, I took the virginity of a lad named Josh Dahl. Scowling tenderly through wire-rimmed glasses, Josh was another of my soft-centered cynics. He cared passionately about environmental issues, and had hooked up with
something called the Learning Community, a sort of anticollege recently begun by a bunch of disaffected Reed professors and students. Josh and I shared an attraction to alpine wilderness and Martin Heidegger’s impenetrable thinking.
My final memory of Reed is of sunning on the lawn, Josh stretched shirtless beside me. I was mad for the shy heat of his toast-and-honey-colored body, but struggling to keep things in perspective. I meant to know the world and not to lose myself again. In my hand was a copy of a newsmagazine, open to an article on the My Lai massacre. In a day or two when the dormitories closed, I’d be flying with Alexa to her home in the Berkeley hills. Her parents were divorcing, her dad moving back east. She and I would be driving his car across the country.
FIVE
Ménage à N
women women surround me
images of women their faces
I who for years pretended them away
pretended away their names their faces
myself what I am pretended it away
—Susan Sherman, “Lilith of the Wildwood,
of the Fair Places”
LIKE MANY PEOPLE who profess disdain of daytime television and its print equivalents, I long ago became addicted to the intellectually correct soap opera served up in books about Virginia Woolf and friends. When I puzzle over Bloomsbury’s sexual intricacies, wondering how even such a madly creative bunch could concoct a plot in which a sheltered young woman ends up marrying a man who buggered her father before she was a gleam in either of their eyes, I have only to think of the Learning Community to recall my own season of metaphorical incest, of baroque erotic complications that seemed standard at the time.